To keep pace with competitors, business entities such as financial institutions often need to convert their business processes or workflows into more efficient and productive information technology solutions. Implementing even a seemingly basic change to information technology infrastructure, however, may require involvement by multiple functional layers of the business including accounting, finance, customer service, information technology functions, or possibly other areas.
For example, traditional approaches to building or modifying web-based applications that assist with the client interface or client access aspects of business operations usually involve engaging many technicians with a variety of skill sets and backgrounds. Such conventional approaches may employ end user applications, web servers, ad hoc programming, or other components that compound their functions with existing information architecture to make the information technology system of the business even more complex and difficult to maintain.
Even when considering only the information technology function, multiple personnel must be identified and made available for a given application development task: a skilled HTML programmer may be needed to develop a user interface or browser; a graphics designer may be needed to develop screen presentation; a Java or .NET programmer may be needed to program application server functions; and/or an integration specialist who understands HTTP or other like protocols may be needed to facilitate communications among different computer systems. In addition, with particular regard to mainframe computing environments, mainframe development expertise may be necessary to ensure effective data communications, transactions and other functionality associated with accessing the mainframe system. Furthermore, the effort involved in functionally testing a proposed modification such as a new web-based application is typically significant, often consuming substantial time and resources across many different functional areas of the business.
Industry movement away from mainframe-focused architecture to distributed application server-based architecture has had further significant disadvantages, especially in view of the issues described above. For example, with respect to data originally stored and communicated from a mainframe system, the data must be pushed to and synchronized with the application servers that ultimately present the data to clients or users. In addition, modifications to applications or data on the mainframe system must likewise be updated for any distributed systems that depend on such mainframe applications or data. Also, copying portions of data or applications from the mainframe to a distributed application server environment can negatively impact security, control, and processing speed for data transactions.
In view of the issues described above, more effective and efficient systems, processes, tools and strategies are needed to build and configure applications and generally to enhance data communication and processing within computer-based environments, especially computing environments which are at least partially dependent on a mainframe computer system.